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Mummy Bear: Ritual of Remembrance

Wrapped in Memory

My father called me Bear.
Each year on my birthday, a Teddy Bear arrived in his hands, a small ritual of love, a thread tying us together.

Then came the forgetting.
Dementia unraveled his memory, his personality, his knowing of me. The year the ritual broke, I wrapped one of his bears in cloth and yarn, sealing love inside layers of fabric. That first act of mummification became a meditation, an attempt to hold what was slipping away.

Since then, I have bound bear after bear, each one heavy with memory. Each one a vessel of grief and tenderness. Each one a tether back to him. By the time his eyes no longer found mine, six Mummy Bears stood as witnesses, silent guardians of our bond.

On Thanksgiving 2024, my father left this world. Yet the ritual endures.
Each year, I wrap another bear., to remember, to weave him back into my life.

My Mummy Bears are not toys.
They are offerings.
They are prayers.
They are the shape of love, surviving loss.

To wrap a bear, is to wrap my father back into being, to fold time, memory, and grief into a form I can hold.
He remains with me, thread by thread, bear by bear,
forever my father,
forever his Bear.

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Lenore Tawney: A Glimpse into Her Studio

Lenore Tawney redefined how we see textiles, lifting them beyond craft into the realm of fine art. Watching archival footage of her in her Coenties Slip studio in New York City, circa 1960, long before I was born, feels like being granted a window into history.

Technology allows me to sit here decades later and witness her world: the light streaming in by her favorite chair, a feisty cat chasing stray strings, drawers of yarn meticulously sorted by color. These small, intimate details make my heart sing.

The clip also stirs memories of my own time in Jersey City, working in my 150 Bay Street studio overlooking the Hudson River. Like Tawney, I found inspiration in both the view and the rhythm of everyday studio life. Her practice reminds me how the simplest gestures, thread, light, and place, can transform into something transcendent.

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Newark Arts Festival 2025: Finding JOY Together

I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be back in Newark this fall for Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY, and I couldn’t be more excited! This festival is always such a special time to reconnect with friends I haven’t seen in far too long and to celebrate the incredible community of artists and supporters that call Newark area home. If you’re planning to attend, let’s definitely link up.

My celebrations kick off in style at The Gold Ball on October 8, 6–11pm at the Newark Museum of Art. From there, you’ll find my work in not one but two powerful exhibitions, each embracing JOY as a creative force that sustains, uplifts, and sparks transformation.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

📍 Newark Museum of Art (49 Washington St, Newark, NJ)
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 2, 2026

  • Classic LBD & Boa Quill
    • Classic LBD recasts the iconic little black dress as armor against microaggressions.
    • Boa Quill poses the question: If I adorned myself in a feather boa made of zip ties, would you still come for me in the same way?

Newark Arts Festival 2025: Pure Joy

📍 Express Newark – Paul Robeson Galleries, Main Gallery (Third Floor, Hahnes Building, 54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ)
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 26, 2026

  • Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart is an Emotional Baggage Cart adorned with soft, vibrant plastic pom-poms that transform weight into play, joy, and resilience.

🎉 Opening Reception: Thursday, October 9, from 5pm onward
Gallery Hours:

  • Festival Weekend: Friday 12–5pm, Saturday 12–5pm
  • Regular Hours: Mon–Wed 12–5pm, Thu 12–8pm, Sat 12–5pm

At Newark Arts Festival this year, we’re centering JOY, that golden state of being that connects us to our shared humanity. JOY is resistance. JOY is healing. JOY is transformation. My work joins many others in asking: What’s your JOY?

I can’t wait to celebrate, to see familiar faces, and to bask in the joy that art brings us all.

✨ Will you be there? Let me know, I’d love to catch up.

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You’re Invited: Pure Joy Opening at Newark Arts Festival 2025

I’m excited to share that my work will be part of Pure Joy, Newark Arts’ inaugural group exhibition at the Paul Robeson Galleries @ Express Newark. This landmark show celebrates Newark Arts Festival 2025 and brings together over 70 visual artists exploring joy as a creative force.

Pure Joy highlights joy not as fleeting, but as a catalyst for resilience, hope, and connection. Through painting, film, and mixed-media, the exhibition showcases how artists transform joy into an act of resistance, love, and cultural celebration.

As Audre Lorde reminds us: “Once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.”

✨ Please RSVP (free) to join me for the opening reception and festival weekend!

Opening Reception: Thursday, 5–9pm
Festival Hours: Friday 5–10pm | Saturday 12–5pm
Regular Hours: Mon–Wed 12–5pm | Thurs 12–8pm | Sat 12–5pm

Let’s celebrate joy together!

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Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Curated by Patricia Miranda and supported by ArtsWestchester, this exhibition brings together artists including Rachel Olivia Berg, Zaria Forman, Jaanika Peerna, Sarah Cameron Sunde, myself, and many more to confront the urgent realities of climate change.

The show reflects on the Hudson Valley’s vulnerabilities to rising waters and the shifting symbolism of ice, once a resource, now a fragile warning of what we stand to lose.

My piece, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody, transforms single-use bottle caps into woven vines and blossoms inspired by the lush vegetation on my rainforest property. The work reimagines waste as beauty while holding space for the tension between human consumption and the natural world’s resilience.

Artists have always been catalysts for awareness. Meltdown invites us to bear witness, reflect, and act.

Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 4-6PM

Exhibition Dates: October 12, 2025- January 11, 2026

Location: ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Ave, White Plains, NY

Theda Sandiford Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody Woven bottlecaps vines on blue and white polyurethane rope and paracord draped on rolling Z rack 79 x 12 x 72 in 2023
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October Exhibitions: Newark & San Diego

October is shaping up to be a joyful, art-filled month, and I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be participating in three exhibitions that hold deep meaning for me. Each show invites us to consider resilience, transformation, and the many ways art can be a vessel for joy and collective healing.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

📍 Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 2, 2026

At the Newark Museum of Art, two of my pieces will be on view: Classic LBD and Boa Quill.

  • Classic LBD reimagines the iconic little black dress as armor against microaggressions.
  • Boa Quill asks the question: If I adorned myself in a feather boa of zip ties, would you still come for me in the same way?

Both works embody my ongoing exploration of how everyday objects and adornments can be transformed into protective talismans.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: Pure Joy

📍 Express Newark – Paul Robeson Galleries, Main Gallery, Hahnes Building, 54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 26, 2026

At Express Newark, I’ll be showing Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart. Covered in bright pom-poms, this work transforms heaviness into play, using joy itself as a form of resistance and resilience.

Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 4–6pm
Dates: October 12, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Location: ArtsWestchester Galleries, 31 Mamaroneck Ave, White Plains, NY
Learn More

Curated by Patricia Miranda, Meltdown addresses the urgent realities of climate change through the lens of ice as both resource and warning. My work Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody reflects on the lush vegetation of my rainforest property, reimagining single-use plastics as woven blossoms to mirror the vibrant forms of heliconias and birds of paradise.

Interpretations 2025

📍 Visions Museum of Textile Art, 2825 Dewey Rd #100, San Diego, CA
🗓 October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
🎉 Festival Days: October 17–18, 2025

I’m honored to be part of Interpretations 2025 at the Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego. This exhibition celebrates innovation in textile art and brings together a remarkable community of artists. My Blackity Black Blanket Ladders will be on display. Blackity Black Blanket Ladders are woven monuments of reclaimed materials that honor Black resilience, transforming the weight of microaggressions into visible, collective testimony.

October will be a month of celebration, connection, and, most importantly, JOY. If you plan to attend Newark Arts Festival or Interpretations 2025, let me know, I’d love to see you there and share in these moments together.

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Nesting Into Inspiration

This month has been a season of settling in, creating, and reconnecting with my practice. I’ve been nesting in my studio, opening long-forgotten boxes, sorting materials, and rediscovering treasures that feel like gifts waiting to be transformed. There’s something grounding about this process of organizing and making space; each thread, each object, reminds me of where I’ve been and what’s possible.

Hurricane season has brought its own rhythm. The rains return, streams carve their paths through the property, uncovering shards of pottery and even revealing waterfalls. We’ve been clearing walking paths to open up the waterfall that flows between our home and the residency property, a reminder of how nature constantly reshapes and uncovers what is hidden.

I’ve been cutting back invasive vines, and soon their fibers will find their way into my work. I’ve also been upcycling rope, fabric, and leftover yarn into the beginnings of new projects that are slowly, patiently coming together. When the power goes out and I’m forced to shelter in place, I take it as an invitation to slow down, to listen, and to let the work unfold at its own pace.

In this season, I’m learning again that inspiration isn’t something to chase. It emerges naturally, like streams after the rain, if I make space, clear the path, and let it flow.

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Work In Progress: Swallowed Silence

Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled and salt-worn, is my starting point for this vessel. I wove and knotted the rope with yarn, letting each twist carry memory, frustration, and resilience. What emerged is not just an object, but a container for the silences I’ve had to swallow.

This piece speaks to the moments when ideas were dismissed until repeated by another voice, suddenly valid, but no longer mine. It embodies the raw tension of being unseen, unheard, and undervalued. Every knot becomes both a reminder and a refusal, binding what was silenced into something visible, undeniable.

The vessel is tangled, resilient, and true. It carries the weight of memory while resisting erasure. Like the marine line itself, once discarded, now recovered and remade, it is a testament to survival and transformation.

Alongside the work, I wrote this haiku:

Sea-tumbled cord knotted,
swallowed silence made visible,
resistance holds fast.

Together, the poem and the vessel create a net of memory and resistance—an offering of truth that can no longer be unseen.

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Mark Your Calendars: Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

From October 8–12, 2025, Newark Arts Festival will transform the city into a living canvas of art, music, and culture. This year’s theme, JOY, celebrates its power as a bold and transformative force—one that uplifts, empowers, and connects us all.

JOY is not frivolous. It is strength, harmony, and revolutionary change. This October, the festival invites us to embrace JOY in its fullest sense, through exhibitions, live performances, thought-provoking talks, family-friendly programming, and more.

I’m honored to be showing work in two venues this year:

Newark Museum of Art

49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
Works on view: Classic LBD & Boa Quill (2 of 5)

These works address the insidious weight of microaggressions, those subtle, often unconscious insults that people of color experience in everyday life.

  • Have you been followed by security while shopping?
  • Asked to prove you “belong” in your own home or garage?
  • Mistaken for “the help” in a store or restaurant?
  • Or expected to represent “all Black Americans” when the only person of color in a room?

These furtive slights accumulate into stress, anger, frustration, and invisibility. Classic LBD recasts the timeless “little black dress” as armor against microaggressions, while Boa Quill expands this conversation, transforming stereotype and bias into a statement of resistance and resilience.

Boa Quill
Theda Sandiford
100′ of slip half hitched chain black glitter 1/4” cotton rope, knotted with ribbon, recycled sari ribbon, acrylic yarn, pearls and 8” zip ties on bamboo ring.
60 x 14 x 4 in
2021
Classic LBD
Theda Sandiford
Recycled fishing net, ribbon, paracord and handmade jewelry on dressform
46 x 20 x 6 in
2020

Express Newark

54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ
Work on view: Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart

This piece transforms a reclaimed shopping cart, wrapped in woven New York Post newspaper sleeves, into a vessel of joyful resistance. BAD NEWS becomes reimagined as beauty, hope, and empowerment, an act of flipping the narrative.

Joyful resistance is about reclaiming space, finding connection, and celebrating resilience in the face of adversity. It is about holding onto vision and possibility, even when challenged by oppressive forces. By weaving the mundane into the extraordinary, this cart becomes both a shield and a beacon, carrying stories of survival and transformation.

Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart Theda Sandiford Bike reflectors and bell, paracord, Fresh Direct bag yarn, doggie poop bags, plastic newspaper bags and plastic grocery bags woven on gold spray painted recovered shopping cart. 36 x 40 x 24 in 2021

Come Celebrate JOY

Newark Arts Festival 2025 is an invitation to see Newark in full, vibrant color. Whether you are deeply rooted in the arts or simply curious, come celebrate JOY as the heartbeat of the community.

📅 October 8–12, 2025
📍 Newark Museum of Art & Express Newark

What’s your JOY?